P-Bass - Tonelectro

I've always loved Danelectros, The Neptune Bound book is a great resource for all the innovations Nat Daniels came up with. My old Silvertone U1 still has the most comfortable and stable neck off all my guitars. This project came up while talking to Don Tony about mushing a 50's style P and a Danelectro together. It would have the slab body style with all the Dano trimmings, Long scale and a Coke Bottle headstock.

It has a body construction similar to more recent dano reissues with a plywood body and 3mm masonite on the top and back. I had some QLD maple for the neck. I would have loved to use some nice dark Rosewood for the fingerboard but i didn't have any long enough. A friend gave me some stripped Ebony that looked great so that'll do.

I had a bit of an experiment with making my own Lipstick style pickup. They worked and sounded alright but decided that cheap option was again the best and found a lipstick on the evil bays. The paint job was always going to be the classic Dano Copper. My local automotive paint shop had the perfect shade of metallic copper on their books, it ended up coming out a little washed out because the tinter used with metallic paint doesnt love being mixed with Nitro. I also designed a Danoelectro esque decal with one small change.

It's strung up with a light set of D'addarrio Chromes 45-90. I wanted to use a set of Gibson Deluxe Kluson style tuners i had around. In keeping with Dano using guitar tuners on their Basses it had to have a string that was thin enough at the peg head to fit through a small hole.

The finished product came out super nice. I glued the tolex sides down with titebond which was a tip i learnt from luthierylabs.com. A super helpful resource on some common sense and simple guitar building. I salvaged the knobs from an old Klemt Echo unit that was gifted to me.